R.P. Finch

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The Journey Motif in 'The Half-Life of Guilt' Is No Guilt Trip

Sep 12, 2024 | popmatters.com | R.P. Finch

The Half Life of GuiltHigh Road Books The Half-Life of Guilt‘s plot is a simple story about a couple on a difficult road trip. Mason, the codeine-dependent driver and a National Geographic photographer, will take photos in Baja, California, for a story about an environmentally sensitive Mexican development project. Clair, his romantic partner and a plant biologist, comes along to study native plants in the area.
Lindsey Drager's 'The Avian Hourglass' Is Wonderfully Weird

Jul 15, 2024 | popmatters.com | R.P. Finch

The Avian Hourglass DancAuthor and professor Lindsey Drager’s new novel, The Avian Hourglass, presents a deeply engaging journey through dreamlike terrain. It is intellectually even more challenging and weird than her excellent 2019 novel, The Archive of Alternate Endings. In The Avian Hourglass, an unidentified narrator navigates a plethora of exceedingly strange circumstances in an unidentified town while studying for her fifth (and final) attempt to pass the test to become a radio astronomer.
War Fever in Norman Lock's 'The Caricaturist'

Jun 11, 2024 | popmatters.com | R.P. Finch

The CaricaturistBellevue Literary PressIn his American Novels Series, Norman Lock presents reconstructed eras in American literary history. Each novel involves a writer: Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Melville, among others. In The Caricaturist, the 11th stand-alone novel in this series, the narrator, Oliver Fischer, encounters poet and novelist Stephen Crane during the tumultuous run-up to the Spanish-American War.
Colin Barrett's Debut Novel Wild Houses Unfolds Predictably

Mar 13, 2024 | popmatters.com | R.P. Finch

Colin Barrett is a renowned short-story writer whose debut novel, Wild Houses, is set in the west of Ireland. The story brings to life a gaggle of minor-league tough guys trying to make their way in the (under)world. As to the plot, the Ferdia brothers are drug dealers, along with their friend Cillian. Cillian holds in safekeeping, for their boss, €30k worth of drugs, which he buries in a turlough, a type of meadow unique to western Ireland that occasionally floods to become a temporary lake.
Personhood and Performance in Soloski's 'Here in the Dark'

Jan 9, 2024 | popmatters.com | R.P. Finch

Here in the DarkFlatiron Here in the Dark is the debut novel by Alexis Soloski, formerly the theater critic for The Village Voice and now a culture writer for The New York Times. Crafting a theater review utilizes a wholly different skillset from that required in crafting a novel, so the question is whether Soloski has bridged this divide. The answer is: ‘Oh yes.’ Here in the Dark presents a twisty plot. The storyline is full of snappy reparté and surprises that will stop readers in their tracks.
We Can Only Imagine: On Consciousness and Physics

Jun 13, 2023 | tinyurl.com | R.P. Finch |Spyros Stasis |Michael Barrett |Michael Nelson

The subtitle of The World Itself by Ulf Danielsson – Consciousness and the Everything of Physics – captures the notion at the heart of this book. Danielsson, a Swedish physicist, urges a “new way of understanding the physics of the universe”, arguing that physics is “a theory of everything, by definition”, and therefore physics must be broadened to include the “first-person perspective”, meaning consciousness.
A Debut Novel, Between Two Moons, is set in "Arabland" Brooklyn

May 15, 2023 | themarkaz.org | R.P. Finch

Between Two Moons, a novel by Aisha Abdel GawadDoubleday 2023ISBN 9780385548618R.P. FinchBetween Two Moons, by Aisha Abdel Gawad, is a novel of duality, both delightful and foreboding. The author presents a nuclear family attempting to avoid fission, all of its spinning particles bound together by the strong force of Muslim culture and parental love, set against the centrifugal forces embodied, to varying degrees, by Sami, the son, and twin daughters Lina and Amira.
'The Reservoir' Drifts Between Fact and Hallucination

Jan 20, 2023 | popmatters.com | R.P. Finch

The progeny of our current pandemic is various: illness and death, of course, but also economic dislocation and personal isolation, the concept of ‘social distancing’ having quickly morphed from an advisory into a way of life. David Duchovny’s excellent new novella, The Reservoir, is a fever dream born out of this isolation.